Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (26 page)

When Burnes was summoned to give advice at the Governor General’s Residence in Simla on 20 July, he was warned not to muddle Auckland or attempt to change his mind. According to Masson, ‘when he arrived, Torrens and Colvin came running to him and prayed him to say nothing to unsettle his Lordship; that they had all the trouble in the world to get him into the business and that even now he would be glad of any pretext to retire from it’.
129
As late as August, Auckland was still oscillating between plans and examining all possible options.

Nonetheless, the pieces were now slowly falling into place, with the invasion plans driven forward relentlessly by Macnaghten and the hawks in the administration despite Auckland’s anxieties and reservations.
130
Every day, the scale of the invasion and the degree of British participation gradually increased until a full 20,000 British troops were committed: the largest military operation undertaken by Company forces for two decades, and the first really major conflict since the defeat of Tipu Sultan forty years earlier.

On 10 September, the order for mobilisation was given: Lord Auckland formally asked his Commander-in-Chief to assemble an army for the march into Afghanistan. Across India, sleepy cantonments slowly began to stir into action. In Landour, Captain William Dennie scribbled in his diary: ‘We are on the verge of something momentous. They say we are going to fight the Russians or Persians.’
131
The same day, Burnes was sent off to prepare a way for the army through Sindh. ‘Twenty thousand men are now under orders to do what a word might have done earlier,’ he wrote to Holland, ‘and two millions of money must be sunk in to do what I offered to do for two lakhs!’
132
But he was not unhappy: his orders had come in an envelope inscribed ‘Sir Alexander Burnes’. At first he thought it was an error; only on opening it did he discover he had been given a knighthood. His mission may have failed, and Macnaghten may have been given the political command of the expedition he had hoped for; but his willingness publicly to support a policy he had always opposed, against a ruler he had liked and whose hospitality he had enjoyed, had been noted by his superiors. So had the fact that he had kept quiet when his despatches from Kabul were edited in such a way that made it appear he had always supported the restoration of Shuja before being published as a Parliamentary Blue Book.
n
For all the frustrations of the last few months, he had kept his mouth shut and been rewarded for his silence. His star was still in the ascendant.

On 1 October, Auckland issued what came to be known as the Simla Manifesto, formally declaring war and announcing Britain’s intention to restore Shah Shuja to the Afghan throne by force. ‘Poor, dear peaceful George has gone to war,’ wrote Emily to her uncle, the former Governor General Lord Minto, who had first despatched Elphinstone to Afghanistan. ‘Rather an inconsistency in his character.’
133

Auckland’s manifesto was more or less pure propaganda – a deliberate and blatant inversion of the available intelligence – and was recognised at once by the Indian press as ‘a most disingenuous distortion of the truth’.
134
One Indian civil servant pointed out that the manifesto used ‘the words “justice” and “necessity”, and the terms “frontier”, “security of the possessions of the British Crown” and “national defence” in a manner for which fortunately no precedent existed in the English language’.
135

In the manifesto Auckland accused Dost Mohammad of ‘urging the most unreasonable pretensions, avowing schemes of aggrandizement and ambition injurious to the security and peace of the frontiers of India’ in pursuit of which ‘he openly threatened . . . to call in every foreign aid which he could command’, and of having ‘made a sudden and unprovoked attack on our ancient ally, Maharajah Ranjit Singh’. He was also accused of giving ‘undisguised support to Persian designs . . . of extending Persian influence and authority to the banks of, and even beyond, the Indus’. The war, he claimed, was intended ‘to set up a permanent barrier against schemes of aggression on our North West Frontier’. This was of course a complete travesty of the facts, but it was too late now for Auckland to change his position even if he wanted to; thanks to the hawks he had surrounded himself with, events had now acquired their own momentum.

The popularity of Shah Shuja, the document went on, was ‘proved to his Lordship by the strong and unanimous testimony of the best authorities’. For this reason the British were to assist the legitimate ruler of Kabul ‘to enter Afghanistan, surrounded by his own troops’. This was also far from truth. After thirty years in comfortable retirement, the Shah, now in his late fifties, was about to lead his fourth expedition to reclaim his throne. This time, however, it would be at the head of a British Indian army, for British interests, and closely supervised by British officials.

It was not by any means the homecoming he had spent decades dreaming of. But for Shuja, at this advanced stage in his life, it hardly mattered. As far as he and his courtiers were concerned this was not an unjustified, unprovoked and unnecessary British invasion of an independent country. This was the return of a king.

4

The Mouth of Hell

Shah Shuja’s fourth attempt at recapturing his throne – what would be remembered by British historians as the opening of the First Afghan War – got off to as chaotic a start as any of its predecessors.

The plan was, in principle, a good one. First there would be a ceremonial send-off at Ferozepur in the Punjab, attended by all three of the signatories of the Tripartite Alliance. Then, as with Shah Shuja’s previous expedition five years earlier, Afghanistan would be invaded by two routes. One army, led by the Shah’s eldest son, the Crown Prince Timur, assisted by Colonel Wade and a regiment of Punjabi Muslims supplied by Ranjit Singh, would move north through Peshawar up the Khyber Pass and hence towards Jalalabad. The other – much the larger of the two – would nominally be led by Shah Shuja under the watch of Macnaghten, assisted by troops from the Company’s Bengal and Bombay armies. This force would loop south around the Punjab, as Ranjit had now banned British soldiers from marching through his lands. It would then head through the Bolan Pass to attack southern Afghanistan below Kandahar before heading on to Ghazni. Both forces would converge on Kabul to restore Shuja to his throne in the Bala Hisar. At the same time, Shah Shuja’s many eager allies in Afghanistan would rise up in his favour, expelling the ‘usurper’, Dost Mohammad. ‘Almost every chief of note should begin to tender his homage to Shah Shooja before he has entered the country,’ Wade assured Auckland.
1
But, from the beginning, almost nothing went as planned.

The Simla Manifesto had been explicit that the Shah would return home ‘surrounded by his own troops’. The problem was that Shuja at this point had no troops; indeed his only followers were his usual handful of mutilated household servants. So the first thing was to recruit a new army, the Shah Shuja Contingent. Would-be recruits began arriving in Ludhiana throughout the summer of 1838. A few of them were Indian Afghans of Rohilla descent whose ancestors had migrated to the Ganges basin in the eighteenth century, but most of them were local ‘Hindoos . . . camp followers from the Company’s military stations’. The recruits were so wild and raw, however, and so undisciplined, that it was soon decided that this ‘rabble’ of ‘ragamuffins’ were not fit to be put on public parade at the grand ceremonial launch of the expedition at Ferozepur.
2
There was also the issue, as one British officer put it in a letter, that it was clearly a ‘fiction [that] the “Shah [was] entering his dominions surrounded by his own troops” when the fact is too notorious to escape detection and exposure, that he has not a single subject or Affghan amongst them’.
3

So in late August, ahead of the rest of the army, Shuja and his Contingent were quietly marched off out of sight through Ferozepur to Shikarpur, there to begin intensive drilling. Before long, the Contingent had deviated from its intended route, run amok and looted Larkana.
4
o
This revived memories across Sindh of the violence and ‘great excesses’ committed by Shuja’s troops on their last promenade up the Indus, rendering the Amirs of Sindh even less willing to help than they had been. To make matters worse, the first Bombay troops arriving by sea at Karachi mistook an artillery salute from the lighthouse for an attack, and reduced to rubble the principal coastal fort of their supposed Sindhi allies.

This was not the only problem. Ominously, the revival of Shuja’s fortunes seemed already to have gone to his head. Before long the Shah – whose good nature had clearly been corroded and hardened by his long run of ill-fortune – had fallen out with all his British officers, alienating them with his haughtiness and his insistence on making them remain standing in his presence.
5
He also alarmed his British minders by referring to the Afghans, his future subjects, as ‘a pack of dogs, one and all’.
6
‘We must try’, noted an exasperated Macnaghten, ‘and bring him gradually round to entertain a more favourable view of his subjects.’ Meanwhile, Prince Timur had failed to set off from Ludhiana at all – ‘The Prince is such a fool that he has not budged an inch,’ wrote his father in one of a series of apoplectic notes sent to Wade from Shikarpur.
7

So it was that the ceremonial send-off for Lord Auckland’s war took place without the presence of the man in whose name the expedition was being sent, or indeed of any of his dynasty. In lieu of the Sadozais, the Edens set off from Simla in the middle of a monsoon downpour. Emily was not at all happy to leave her beloved Himalayan retreat. ‘It is impossible to describe the squalid misery of a really wet day in camp,’ she complained soon after hitting the plains.

The servants looked soaked and wretched, their cooking pots not come from the last camp, and the tents were leaking in all directions: wherever there is a seam there is a stream . . . The camels are slipping down and dying, the hackeries sticking in the rivers. And one’s personal comfort! Little ditches running around each tent, with a
slosh
of mud that one invariably slips into . . . I go under an umbrella from my tent to George’s, and we are carried in palanquins to the dining tent on one side, where the dinner arrives in a palanquin on the other . . .
8

On the way they stopped in Ludhiana to meet Prince Timur, who had still failed to leave for Peshawar. ‘We had an enormous dinner at Major Wade’s yesterday,’ wrote Fanny, ‘and the city was illuminated after the native way in long lines of little lamps . . . Shuja’s son came to it, and having no elephant as well as no kingdom, they sent my own particular one to fetch him.’
9
Meanwhile, Macnaghten had lost his plates and cutlery in the chaos of the move, a cause of much anxiety for one so obsessed with the finer points of etiquette. ‘Great terror reigns in the camp on account of that,’ reported Fanny. ‘What will Shah Soojah who eats with his fingers think of Macnaghten if he does the same?’
10

The Governor General’s damp encampment was only one part of a much larger monsoon mobilisation of troops across the entire north and west of India.

In the Bombay rain, regiments were streaming from their barracks down to the beaches to be loaded on board troop transports and ferried across the stormy sea to Karachi, Thatta and other landing points around the mouth of the Indus. In the cantonments below the Delhi Ridge, the riders of the new experimental camel batteries – mobile camel-borne mortar and Congreve rocket systems – were struggling to harness their obstinate camels. In Hansi, Colonel James Skinner was attempting to call up his reserves from the flooded pasturelands of Haryana while orderlies polished the rusting helmets and chain mail of the troopers. In Meerut and Roorkee the cantonments were awash with mud as the Company sepoys packed up their kit and began the march up the Grand Trunk Road towards Karnal and Ferozepur, their bedraggled wives and mistresses streaming through the quagmire behind them.

Leading one regiment through the monsoon mud was William Nott, a plainspoken yeoman farmer’s son from the Welsh borders who had arrived in India forty years earlier, fresh from Caernarvon, and had slowly worked his way up to become one of the most senior Company generals in India. He and his sepoys – ‘the fine manly soldiers’ to whom he was fiercely attached – struggled up the road to Karnal from their base in Delhi where he had just buried his ‘beloved and lamented Letitia’, his wife of twenty years. ‘The road was covered with troops, guns, gun-carriages, ammunition and treasure,’ he wrote. ‘It required patience in man and horse to wend their way between these hackeries and implements of war.’